The third generation partnership project (3GPP) is keenly discussing small cell enhancement in release 12. In particular, discussions on the small cell enhancement are centered on the on/off operation of a base station in a small cell (“small cell on/off”, “small cell dormant” or “small cell DRX”).
It is widely known that small cells densely disposed in a heterogeneous network cause mutual interference with signals between the cells and degrade the communication quality. Base stations are always in operation in general irrespective of the statuses of terminal devices. Accordingly, an increase in small cells in number may lead to enormous power consumption in the entire network. It is thus desired to restrict interference or to reduce the power consumption of the entire network by adaptive on/off control over small cells.
As the related art, for example, Patent Literature 1 discloses a technique of operating a base station with low power consumption by using the two operation modes of an active mode and a transmission standby mode for operations with low power consumption.